People of the Maldive Islands by Maloney

From the preface of

Maloney, C. (1980). People of the Maldive Islands. Bombay: Orient Longman.

The twentieth century was but a faint breeze blowing over the Maldive Islands until the 1970s; now it is coming in rush…

It was only in the 1970s that Māle, the capital, was linked by regular air service to Colombo and
Trivandrum. Now, nine islands have modern tourist hotels, and specialists from United Nations agencies and Colombo Plan countries are descending on the country.

All these foreign contacts, the tourists, and the new sources of money, are drawing the Maldives into the matrix of world-wide communication. And the old culture is being stirred to its depths.

But that culture has rarely been described because these islands have been virtually ignored by travellers, journalists and scholars alike. How different from the tropical coral islands of the South Pacific and the Caribbean, which have been romanticised and anthropologised for decades! This book is the first substantial scholarly work published on the Maldives since H.C.P. Bell prepared his book on Maldivian antiquities fifty years ago. It is time to catch up on our negligence of this southern extremity of South Asia…

There are three book-length old sources on the Maldives which provide the main points for tracing the evolution of its culture. First, is the account of Francois Pyrard, a Frenchman wrecked there in 1602 and detained for five and a half years. He learned the language (called Divehi) well, and his work, perceptive and accurate, is rather like an ethnography written before the concept of ‘ethnography’ was invented. It is cited frequently in this book. Second, is the account of two Englishmen, Young and Christopher, deputed to the Maldives in the 1930s as part of a marine survey team, and they recorded information of interest to the British in India. The third work is that of H.C.P. Bell, who made a brief stay in 1879, when shipwrecked, and visited again in 1920 and 1922, deputed by the Government of Ceylon to study Maldivian
Buddhist antiquities. Bell had long experience in the historical archaeology of Śrī Lankā. In his later years, as a labour of love, he devoted much scholarship to the Maldives. His book, prepared in the 1920s, but published posthumously, has a wealth of data on the language, Buddhist remnants, Sinahala affinities and history of the Islamic period of the Maldives. He also published twelve articles, Excerpta Maldiviana, on diverse antiquarian subjects. None of these
three works, however, describe or analyse the cultural system, and almost all the old works are based on data obtained in Māle.

The main new findings of this book are as follows:

• The sub-stratum of population, before the arrival of Divehi-speakers from Śrī Lankā, was Dravidian-speaking; the islands were settled originally from Kērala, which is evident in the language, place names, poetry forms, dance forms, relics of Hinduism underlying Buddhism, local political organisation ant the like.
• The kinship system was formerly matrilineal and kinship terms are mostly derived from Malayālam. The kinship system has been modified by Divehi (from Sinhala) influence and has slowly crumbled under eight centuries of Islamic social ideals.
• The myths regarding origin are related to those of Sinhalas.
• The islands are referred to in early Buddhist literature.
• Traditional counting was with 12 as base number, which has interesting historical implications.
• Islam provides the teleological component for both the highly organised political system and the social rules of behaviour.
• Parallel with Islam is a magico-religious system, fanditha, having great importance to individual perception of the world and to psychological adjustment with the environment.
• The former caste system evolved into a highly politicised traditional class system, now using modern mechanisms to maintain itself.
• In every hundred marriages, there are eighty-five divorces; this is an adaptation to psychological needs arising from the settlement pattern and political and social system.
• Behaviour has been adaptive to the constraints and needs of people living a lifetime a lifetime on tiny islands with inter-action limited to a few score or a few hundred
  co-islanders.
• Population growth and density is the most serious problem.
• The new foreign money, the new elite symbols, and the new tourism, plus population growth, are straining the values of the old cultural system.

... Since 1974-75 when the author was in the Maldives there has been a change of government, and the country has been increasingly affected by political and economic currents from abroad...

The Maldives are experiencing intensified contact with the wide world… Now jet planes unload tourists to Hulule airport, which was extended by dirt and stones shipped from India… Māle had about 20,000 people when I was here, now I hear it has newly 40,000 and the consumer tendency is increasing…There are few places in the world that have experience outside influence as rapidly as the Maldives did in one decade during the
1970s.

Clarence Maloney

Informatization

This study sounds ever more important in the current political, social and religious dilemma that the country is experiencing and has been going through for the last few years. The situation seems to have escalated within the last few months and no sooner than we think that there can be nothing worse, something else comes out of the blue.

Any news that I read about Maldives over the Internet, may it be local websites, local online newspapers or official or personal blogs, there emerges one common theme, a theme of despair, lack of trust in the whole social structure. This raises the question of how well-informed or ill-informed Maldivians are.

Have Maldivians been too passive in their world-outlook. Have Maldivians been taught to be passive. Does it have reflections on the current information culture in the Maldives. Can a solution to the dilemmas be sought by equipping the public with information literacy?

On another line of thinking, I can’t help but believe that Maldives is going through similar changes to any other country. Informatization, which is referred to as the process by which information technologies transform social relations which minimises the cultural and economic barriers, with its advantages also brings with it vulnerabilities. The situation looks severe in Maldives in contrast to other countries due to the narrow economic base, the geographic dispersion of the islands, geographic isolation from other countries, and the historically close-knit island communities. People have been exposed to opposing views quite swiftly through the emergence of the web which has been made accessible to the wider public only in the past few years. This coupled with the lack of the necessary education to deal effectively with opposing views; people succumb to it or find themselves in flux with the situation.

Yet again, I see the solution for the existing predicament in enhancing the existing information culture. When or how or by whom, are all questions that need to be tackled.

Promoting Maldives information culture

In Maldives are we doing anything to cultivate an information culture?

Information culture cannot exist ex nihilo. It should be nurtured, and its elements must be taught as with other cultural aspects, such as arts or social norms. This must be done at all staged of education, explaining the complexity of the modern period of transition to electronic means of communication. It is important that university students understand the social laws of intellectual communication. (p.41).

It is true that we do not have a university per se at the moment. However, the Maldives College of Higher Education does offer undergraduate as well as Masters level courses. Do they incorporate information culture components in their curriculum?

Information culture is, among other things, insight into the underlying information mechanisms regulating human behavior and social development. Today, the traditional information pattern of society is changing drastically under the influence of information facilities and by technology rapidly changing and coming into household use. (p.40)

Information culture is seen as a major component in social development. And in Maldives, we are seeing the emergence of information exchange through the Internet. In the absence of a publishing culture, given the small population base, the Internet has paved ways for the general educated public to express their world views through the web and now commonly in personal blogs. The internet has also facilitated the information exchange because of the uncontrolled nature of it. This is especially significant in Maldives where censorship of thought is widely exercised through self-censorship (for the prompt publishing or even trepidation of being subjugated) or authoritative censorship before anything goes out to the public.

This free flow of information which has emerged within the last few years is promising as well as detrimental. Promising as it generates intellectual curiosity which is important for developmental outcomes. Detrimental because of the strong opposition to general beliefs and customs that Maldivians have held strong for a number of decades. The unity of the country, mainly based on its common language and on common religion, is on the verge of being shattered as there is a strong undercurrent of arguments going forth about freedom of religion.

It will be inevitable to hold on to one religion if the current situation persists. Maldivians for so long has been an isolated island in terms of challenging religious perspectives and people have followed in the path of Islam, to some extent, in the namesake of doing it without totally believing it or strong feeling for the religion.

This is where a strong information culture is important. It is important to have access to a wide variety of information and the public to be educated in using this information to make individual informed decisions.

Restricting access to certain kinds of information material, through either restriction on distribution or use or public access in libraries, is not going to stop people from getting access to controversial ideas as information is out there on the web for anyone interested enough to pursue it. Here again, there is a need to educate the users on authoritative information sources.

Information and library culture includes studying such notions as writing, books, documents, library, intellectual communication, information services, intelligence, data, information, knowledge, librarian, bibliographical, archival, and information activity, and informatics. In the course of studies [in information culture], students are given a general idea of electronic information technology and the latest changes in the knowledge dissemination paradigm. Special attention is paid to the regularities of document development and ageing, article distribution over journals, assessment of journal significance, and the time of response to published articles. (p. 41)

Today we live in an information society also increasingly considered as knowledge societies. And information culture is the fundmanetal component of the modern civilised world.

Ref:
Gilyarevskii, R. S. (2007). Information culture in higher education. Scientific and Technical Information Processing, 34(1), 40-43.

Mv Blog culture

The last few weeks have been a strange time. I have gone through so many blogs by Maldivians on all sorts of topics. There are serious posts and some posts just for the sake of posting something. There are also posts for entertainment, keeping up-to-date on a given topic, sharing information with others, different hobbies, random reflections, personal musings and the like.

In terms of the Maldives culture, this shows that Maldivians are no different from any other country or community. There are people who have been bloggnig for quite some time and blogging is part of their daily life. And quite clearly there are Maldivians who have no idea what a blog is; and also there are those who know what it is and does not see any worth in it.